My Mirror column, on the film you must watch in theatres this week:
Chauthi Koot unfolds as an atmospheric, deliberately elliptical journey into 1984 Punjab. But it keeps you on edge.
There are few parts of India so powerfully embedded in the popular cinematic imagination as Punjab. This mythical Bollywood Punjab is all mustard fields and aloo parathas, brimming with bubbly girls whose hands in marriage must be won by boring a heart-shaped hole through some Punjabi patriarch's rough-and-tough exterior.
In recent years, there have been occasional departures from this image: Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana (2012) unpicked the smooth surface of the rural Punjabi family to reveal something charmingly bumpy and dysfunctional; earlier this year Udta Punjab produced a nerve-jangling portrait of the prosperous state as wracked by drug addiction. Outside the mainstream Hindi cinema context, Anup Singh's beautifully shot Qissa (2015) offered an unsettling window into Punjabi masculinity, potentially tying it to the trauma of Partition.
Another vision of Punjab can be seen in theatres this week, in Chauthi Koot (The Fourth Direction). Having premiered in the Un Certain Regard category at Cannes last year and won the National Award for Best Punjabi Film, Chauthi Koot is the second feature film directed by Gurvinder Singh, whose bleak but atmospheric portrait of rural Punjab, Anhey Ghore Da Daan (Alms for a Blind Horse, 2011), won awards internationally as well as in India. Based on a novel by the famous Punjabi writer Gurdial Singh, Anhe Ghore followed the fortunes of a lower-caste family of landless farm workers in a Punjab that had reached the fag-end of the Nehruvian era with many of its inhabitants left out of the state's fabled progress into modernity. Chauthi Koot also draws on the work of a well-known Punjabi writer, Waryam Singh Sandhu, combining two of his short stories to craft a tense, absorbing take on the Punjab of the 1980s, when the Sikh militant movement for a separate state of Khalistan was at its peak.
Singh's exceptionally assured filmmaking makes no attempt to take on the violence head-on, instead circling around the horrific moment of crisis in 1984 when militants holed up in the Golden Temple in Amritsar were gunned down by the army, bringing the confrontation between Indira Gandhi's government and the militancy to a head. The closest we get to Operation Bluestar is a BBC radio broadcast ("Rama Pandey se Hindi mein samachar suniye"). Yet so carefully calibrated is the film's feeling of constriction that right from the start, when we see two men on a bus, waiting to get off, we are drawn into their anxiety.
They walk at a frenetic pace through a crowded gali lined with shops, almost run through a wedding procession, and climb the stairs to a railway station, but as soon as they look out over the platform, we know that they are too late. They wait. They watch as uniformed men walk around the station, getting their boots polished till they gleam. They watch as the train trundles in, and men draped in shawls get off, bundles in their hands. And we watch with them, on tenterhooks, having absorbed the slow menace in the air.
The genius of Singh's film is that we don't actually know what we're waiting for. But it doesn't matter, because we're hooked, watching. And watching this film, unlike the process of watching Hollywood-style suspense, does not involve speed. So we have time, somehow, to look at the poster of Amjad Khan as Gabbar Singh selling glucose biscuits, or the Campa Cola sign that glows dully in red and white, the same colours as the station's plaster arch. And yet the pace does not slack. With every unexplained urgent request, every unannotated new presence, we push our imaginations to work: who are these men? Why are they in such a rush? Who are the strangers already sitting in the compartment? Why did the guard let them in and not these two?
Let me not, however, make it seem that watching Chauthi Koot is like watching some detective story. Because Singh's cinematic technique, redolent as it is of mystery, has little interest in resolutions of the sort we are used to. One of the most striking ways in which he demonstrates this is when halfway through the first narrative, he decides to introduce another. It is framed as what we might ordinarily call a flashback: one of the men on the train remembers something that happened a few months ago. But Singh refuses to stick the narrative rules of cinema -- one man's memory leads us into another man's life, producing an elliptical account that might puzzle viewers who are adamant on knowing how we know what we know.
The second narrative, involving a family who find themselves endangered by their dog's natural instincts, brings us face to face with both militants and police. But again, the tensest moments are not those in which either militant or police violence seems imminent. The film reaches its acme in the relationship between man and dog, forcing us to complicate any easy notions of innocence and victimhood.
But a simple moral resolution is not Singh's style. There are no villains, no heroes. In collaboration with Satya Rai Nagpaul's arresting cinematography and Susmit Bob Nath's brilliant sound design, he makes every lined and unlined face on screen form part of this Punjab that but for him, we would never see. And yet, for me the film's most transporting sequence was a storm — during which 'nothing' happens. In an interview, Singh told me that while filming, he replaced a crucial bit of drama in the script with the storm. This is pure cinematic magic, where images and sounds that have no obvious connection come together to create the film — in our minds.
Published in Mumbai Mirror, 7th August 2016.
Chauthi Koot unfolds as an atmospheric, deliberately elliptical journey into 1984 Punjab. But it keeps you on edge.
There are few parts of India so powerfully embedded in the popular cinematic imagination as Punjab. This mythical Bollywood Punjab is all mustard fields and aloo parathas, brimming with bubbly girls whose hands in marriage must be won by boring a heart-shaped hole through some Punjabi patriarch's rough-and-tough exterior.
In recent years, there have been occasional departures from this image: Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana (2012) unpicked the smooth surface of the rural Punjabi family to reveal something charmingly bumpy and dysfunctional; earlier this year Udta Punjab produced a nerve-jangling portrait of the prosperous state as wracked by drug addiction. Outside the mainstream Hindi cinema context, Anup Singh's beautifully shot Qissa (2015) offered an unsettling window into Punjabi masculinity, potentially tying it to the trauma of Partition.
 |
| Men on the train: a still from Chauthi Koot |
Singh's exceptionally assured filmmaking makes no attempt to take on the violence head-on, instead circling around the horrific moment of crisis in 1984 when militants holed up in the Golden Temple in Amritsar were gunned down by the army, bringing the confrontation between Indira Gandhi's government and the militancy to a head. The closest we get to Operation Bluestar is a BBC radio broadcast ("Rama Pandey se Hindi mein samachar suniye"). Yet so carefully calibrated is the film's feeling of constriction that right from the start, when we see two men on a bus, waiting to get off, we are drawn into their anxiety.
They walk at a frenetic pace through a crowded gali lined with shops, almost run through a wedding procession, and climb the stairs to a railway station, but as soon as they look out over the platform, we know that they are too late. They wait. They watch as uniformed men walk around the station, getting their boots polished till they gleam. They watch as the train trundles in, and men draped in shawls get off, bundles in their hands. And we watch with them, on tenterhooks, having absorbed the slow menace in the air.
The genius of Singh's film is that we don't actually know what we're waiting for. But it doesn't matter, because we're hooked, watching. And watching this film, unlike the process of watching Hollywood-style suspense, does not involve speed. So we have time, somehow, to look at the poster of Amjad Khan as Gabbar Singh selling glucose biscuits, or the Campa Cola sign that glows dully in red and white, the same colours as the station's plaster arch. And yet the pace does not slack. With every unexplained urgent request, every unannotated new presence, we push our imaginations to work: who are these men? Why are they in such a rush? Who are the strangers already sitting in the compartment? Why did the guard let them in and not these two?
Let me not, however, make it seem that watching Chauthi Koot is like watching some detective story. Because Singh's cinematic technique, redolent as it is of mystery, has little interest in resolutions of the sort we are used to. One of the most striking ways in which he demonstrates this is when halfway through the first narrative, he decides to introduce another. It is framed as what we might ordinarily call a flashback: one of the men on the train remembers something that happened a few months ago. But Singh refuses to stick the narrative rules of cinema -- one man's memory leads us into another man's life, producing an elliptical account that might puzzle viewers who are adamant on knowing how we know what we know.
 |
| In the courtyard: a still from Chauthi Koot |
But a simple moral resolution is not Singh's style. There are no villains, no heroes. In collaboration with Satya Rai Nagpaul's arresting cinematography and Susmit Bob Nath's brilliant sound design, he makes every lined and unlined face on screen form part of this Punjab that but for him, we would never see. And yet, for me the film's most transporting sequence was a storm — during which 'nothing' happens. In an interview, Singh told me that while filming, he replaced a crucial bit of drama in the script with the storm. This is pure cinematic magic, where images and sounds that have no obvious connection come together to create the film — in our minds.
Published in Mumbai Mirror, 7th August 2016.
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